Crazy Things Caffeine Does To Your Body

Your brain produces a molecule called adenosine, which binds to receptors in your brain and slows down neural activity: it's a natural process that's thought to help you get to sleep at night but often makes you drowsy during the day. When you knock back that cup of joe in the morning, the caffeine is quickly absorbed into the blood and makes its way to the brain. There, it makes like a bad house guest and plops itself down in adenosine's favorite armchair. But where adenosine makes you tired, caffeine doesn't, and so every brain receptor that binds with caffeine is one that can't make you tired. In other words, caffeine doesn't have an agenda, and it called shotgun.

Increased energy is one of many parallel side effects that caffeine has on the body. When adenosine is blocked from making connections in the brain, it just sort of wanders off and tricks the brain into a mild fight or flight response. This inevitably leads to adrenaline being released, which makes your heart beat faster and harder and causes sugar to be released into your bloodstream. A similar effect can be achieved by standing next to a dangerous wild animal, but it's not quite as convenient.

As well as stealing adenosine's seat, caffeine is something of an enabler to serotonin, dopamine, and other neurotransmitters that help the brain talk to itself. Norepinephrine is another neurotransmitter that's produced in various parts of the body, and is especially good at speeding up brain function and improving concentration and memory retrieval. It also improves muscle function and efficiency. All very useful if you're running from a sabre toothed tiger, as well as for getting that report finished by the deadline.

Unfortunately, for all the positive effects of caffeine on your body, there are a few negatives as well. As with many drugs, dosage is key. Almost anything, even water, can do you harm if taken to extremes, and that goes for caffeine as well. Most of the time, though, it's not the excessive consumption that causes problems (at least not in the short term), but a sudden drop in consumption. When someone consistently consumes high doses of caffeine, the brain adapts by creating more receptors for adenosine to bind to, creating a new normal. This effectively produces a kind of addiction (although not true addiction) since that person then becomes more susceptible to withdrawal symptoms if they cut back, including headaches, irritability, drowsiness, and difficulty concentrating, to name a few of the more pleasant ones. Raise your hand if that sounds like a your morning before you get your first cup of coffee. Then put your hand down and make a cup of coffee.

Although it can take as little as 15 minutes for caffeine to get to work after entering your body, it can take as long as six hours for your body to remove it again. And for all that time, you're under its influence. That's great if you take it at the beginning of a long shift, but not so good if you're planning sleep any time soon. Because with all those extra hormones and neurotransmitters floating around your system, you're unlikely to keep your eyes closed, and when you do finally fall asleep, it messes with your sleep patterns—resulting in less time spent in REM sleep. All this adds up to more fatigue, which equals more coffee, and the whole thing starts again. Caffeine sure picked an effective marketing strategy.